Blog posts by Tom Crawford

Julian Bond, the young college activist from Atlanta who grew to be one of the most influential figures in America’s struggle for civil rights, died Saturday night in Fort Walton Beach, FL, after a brief, undisclosed illness.

Leslie Petch Lee has been named interim campus dean at the medical school located on the University of Georgia campus, effective May 13.

The UGA medical school is affiliated with the Medical College of Georgia (MCG) under the formal name of Georgia Regents University/University of Georgia Medical Partnership.

“There is a strong consensus that Dr. Lee, who has served as a leader at the partnership campus essentially from its beginning, is a terrific choice for interim campus dean,” said Dr. Peter F. Buckley, dean of the Medical College of Georgia at GRU.

Eduardo Samaniego [center] at an Apr. 28 rally outside the UGA Administration building

More than a dozen undocumented immigrants made an emotional plea at a Senate committee meeting Tuesday for a bill that would result in lower tuition rates for them to attend one of Georgia’s public colleges.

While they got a polite and sympathetic hearing from the senators, the students most likely won’t get a break on tuition because the bill is not expected to get a vote in the Senate’s Higher Education Committee.

“If I took a vote today, this bill would not pass,” said Sen. Fran Millar (R-Dunwoody), the committee chairman. “I feel pretty comfortable in telling you that. I can promise you, it will not pass in its present form.”

In the span of less than a month, the president of Georgia Regents University (GRU) in Augusta and the dean of the affiliated health sciences program at the University of Georgia have both been sent packing,

University System officials won’t comment on what’s behind the high-level turmoil, but it appears to be at least partly the product of long-simmering resentments between the Augusta faction and the Athens faction over who should be educating Georgia’s next generation of physicians.

U.S. Rep. Paul Broun plans to hold a prize drawing in which he will award to the winner a semi-automatic Bushmaster AR-15 assault rifle—the same type of weapon used to shoot and kill 20 young schoolchildren and six educators in Newtown, CT.